March 07, 2008

This is a turn up for the books. According to the Jewish Chronicle, The Home Office has written to Netanyahu's deputy, Likud's Moshe Feiglin, to tell him that he can't come to the UK because:

It is considered that you are seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.

“In light of these factors, the Home Secretary is satisfied you should be excluded from the UK on the grounds that your exclusion is conducive to the public good.

In other words his racism is too overt for even a government whose Prime Minister is an honorary patron of the Jewish National Fund. The bad news is that this will be used to suggest that Feiglin's racism is somehow worse than that of the Israeli government, the Israeli state or zionism itself. And of course they'll say that they're being balanced when they ban this or that Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.

Benjamin Netanyahu has once again demonstrated he is a political virtuoso. One may even start to suspect that he invented Moshe Feiglin. Talk is one thing - "we'll uproot Feiglin" - but the result is something else: The Feiglins helped reinvent the Likud Party leader. Now Netanyahu is portrayed exactly as he wished: as a moderate leader, responsible, enlightened and level-headed, as opposed to all those Feiglins. They are "loony," and he is a statesman; they are extreme, a foreign growth, and he is the next prime minister, who will bestow peace and security on Israel. Netanyahu should be grateful to the man who enabled him to deceive the media and the public.

So let's just see how the Brits treat Netanyahu if he ever returns to power.